Friday, November 28, 1980

Thursday November 27th

I spent my morning in the library with Deborah and Duncan. We talked about Jeremy – Deborah saying that he’ll get a big shock when he starts work. Apparently last night at the meeting of the editorial committee she asked him to make some coffee – he refused and called her a “bitch” – Just lately with him it has become a succession of similar incidents – he’s called Angela Reid and Claire Pearson a “fucking bitch” and Deborah a “lying bitch” so we decided, to teach him a lesson, to ignore him. He’s so bloody unsociable.

I talked a lot to Deborah – about their friends, Jeremy, and I also asked her about Pearson’s birthday present (“she won’t be expecting one”). First lesson was English with Slicer – I handed in the wrong book deliberately so I could complete my scene notes tonight.

We didn’t have Hirst today – instead we had a talk by a police Inspector from Farnshaw (Butcher) answering our questions. He was a typical police man – authoritarian, “I was proceeding down the high street” type voice – and, as expected, a right wing reactionary.

We all sat there until 2.30, at which everyone went except about six of us so the thing was much more personal. We had a big thing about the ‘sus’ law, in which this bloke was saying that it operates on a suspicion basis – once someone’s been picked on suspicion he’s got to prove his innocence – so I piped up, (I remember the words exactly) – “Surely that contravenes the old adage that a person is innocent until proved guilty” – to which he answered yes.

It was throwing it down again come college time – sour face went off on his own and Lee, Duncan and Richard came to see my bedroom (I called home to get my cagoul) before we all went to college. Not a word spoken to Jeremy.

I spent all evening completing my scene notes. I got a shock – it really shit me up – for when I was sat downstairs at one a.m. just underlining all my quotations when suddenly someone, something rapped against the window. The cat leaped up – I did, heart pounding – and his hackles rising, he poked his head between the curtains to see what it was. I daredn’t look. He hissed viciously and growled. It could’ve been a cat, or that masked rapist, or even the WHINCLIFFE STRANGLER!!!

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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